Yongzhou was called Lingling in ancient times. According to legend, one of the Five Emperors, Shun Di, the ancestor of China, surrendered to Sanmiao "to March south, collapsed in the wild of Cangwu, and was buried in Jiuyi in the south of the Yangtze River as Lingling." (Historical Records of the Five Emperors) Liu Zongyuan, a writer in the Tang Dynasty who relegated Yongzhou, said in "On Snake Catchers": "There are different snakes in Yongzhou, black and white. When they touch plants, they will die. If you want to bite, there is no royal family. " Jiangyong County, the hometown of Nvshu, is in such a remote place. It is at the southern end of Yongzhou City and in Pangling, the capital of Nanling Mountains bordering Guangxi.
Nvshu, strictly speaking, should be called "Nvshu", that is, women's writing, is a strange set of Chinese characters. It is unique not only in symbol form, recording language, marking language and means, but also in popular areas, social functions and inheritance history.
Nvshu is born out of square Chinese characters and is a variant of square Chinese characters. After research, there are about 1000 basic words * * in women's books. The appearance of the female script is a long diamond-shaped "multi" shape, with the upper right high and the lower left low. Italics are slender, beautiful and slender. At first glance, it looks like Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and there are many familiar Chinese characters.
With regard to the language recorded in Nvshu, after investigation and study by linguists, it is determined that it is neither the popular Southwest Mandarin nor the Yao language, but the local inherent Chinese dialect, which is called the local dialect. Unlike Chinese characters, which are ideograms of morphemes, a word basically corresponds to a morpheme, while a female script is syllabic, and a word basically corresponds to a syllable.
Female calligraphy works are mostly seven-character poems, and their carriers are divided into four categories: paper, book, fan and towel. Most of the content describes the marriage and family, social interaction, bitter affairs, village anecdotes, ballads and riddles of local women, and some of them have been compiled into Chinese song books. Women's books cover a wide range of contents, from which we can clearly see the overall image of local women.
Nvshu has many academic values such as philology, linguistics, sociology, ethnology, anthropology and history. Therefore, it is praised by scholars at home and abroad as "an amazing discovery" and "a miracle in the history of Chinese characters in China".